Everyone said seven

The first time everyone said seven was during lunch. Julie was still in the cafeteria checkout line and I was waiting for her in my usual seat at my usual table. Carla and Riya sat at the end of the table by the windows and were talking about how some guy was going to ask Riya out. The boys at the table behind me were listening to Jack talk about a fight in the locker room. I was waiting for Julie and kinda listening to both conversations at once. That’s when everyone in the cafeteria said seven at the same time.

It wasn’t like they all stopped talking about whatever they were talking about and just randomly said seven.  The word seven just fit into every conversation in the room. Carla said “he called me at seven last night,” and Jack said “he got seven detentions.” Carla and Jack just happened to say seven simultaneously.

But it wasn’t just a weird little coincidence with Carla and Jack. Everyone in the cafeteria who was talking just happened to have the word seven show up in their sentence. There was just the random noise of everyone talking. Then, just for a second, it was like at church when everyone says amen, but it was the word seven.

As weird as that was, what was even weirder was that everyone kept on talking like they didn’t notice they said seven like a Greek chorus. Riya kept talking about going on a date, and the boys behind me kept talking about the locker room. When Julie sat down, I asked her if she heard anything weird. But she had no idea what I was talking about.

It happened again later that night.

I was doing my homework at the kitchen table. I was trying to do my homework, anyway. My mom was talking to me while she was making dinner and the news was on the kitchen TV. My mom was saying something about how much it cost to fix the car, and the news guy was talking about stocks or something. And they both said seven at exactly the same time, just like in the cafeteria.

My mom said it cost seven hundred whatever dollars to fix the car, and the news guy said some stock was down seven percent. Even though they both said seven in perfect sync, my mom didn’t even notice that she said the same thing as the business news guy. She just kept on talking about the car.

I even dreamed about the number seven last night. I dreamed I was in front of an old-fashioned slot machine - the kind where the three wheels of symbols spin around and you win money if they’re all lined up when they stop. In my dream, I pulled the lever and watched the wheels with the cherries and bells and the word bar spin around. When all three wheels stopped turning, they all showed a big red 7. A light on top of the machine flashed and a bell rang. But instead of dumping a bunch of coins into the tray, the machine dumped out a pile of bloody, chopped-off fingers.

* *

Today was horrible, and it had to do with seven again.

When I woke up, I was still freaked out about everyone saying seven yesterday, and about my dream where I won a bunch of chopped-off fingers from the slot machine. That’s why I thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me when I got to school and kept hearing people say seven. They didn’t say seven all at once like in the cafeteria. But every time I passed people talking in the hallway, whoever was talking just happened to be say seven.

“…My brother turns seven this weekend…”

“…I got seven points taken off because I forgot the negative sign...”

“…I turned the volume up to seven just so I wouldn’t hear him…”

Even though there were sevens in every conversation I overheard all morning, I managed to convince myself that I was just being hyperaware of the word seven because of what happened yesterday. Like when I saw Jeeps everywhere last year.

My mom was car shopping and I wanted her to get a Jeep. Because I was constantly thinking and talking about Jeeps, I started noticing every single Jeep on the road. Suddenly, it was Jeeps everywhere. But it wasn’t like there were more Jeeps driving around just because I wanted my mom to get one. I just noticed the ones that were always there because I had been thinking about Jeeps a lot. I thought it was like that with seven – I got freaked out by a weird coincidence yesterday and now I’m just noticing all the sevens that were actually always there.

I managed to keep fooling myself into thinking that’s what was going on until lunch.

There was just one empty seat at my usual table. The tables fit eight people, so you can do the math to figure out how many people were sitting there when I showed up. But I was actually relieved, because after I sat down there would be eight people at the table. I’m cool with the number eight.

“Oh good,” I said, just sort of thinking out loud, “I’m glad there won’t be seven people sitting here.”

Riya stood up so fast her chair fell over. She walked over to me and stared at me for a while. I said “What?” and she reached out and held my hand.

“Riya, what are you doing?”

She gently stroked the back of my hand and brought it up to her face. Then she put my hand on her cheek and kept stroking it.

I started to say something else but I didn’t finish. She opened her mouth super-extra wide, shoved my hand in as far as it would fit and chomped on me, hard. I screamed and tried to yank my hand out of her mouth, but she was biting me so hard I couldn’t get it out. She stared at me with calm, dead eyes for another few seconds before opening her mouth and releasing my hand.

My hand was already bleeding when she let go of it. I had deep tooth-shaped holes on my pinky, ring finger, and middle finger. There was a drop of blood on Riya’s lower lip. She wiped it away and said “Now there will be seven people at the table.”

Then she sat down like nothing happened.

I just stood there because I had no idea what else to do. I watched Riya sit down and start eating. I looked down at my hand. Little streams of blood were oozing out of the tooth marks and dripping onto the floor. I looked around the cafeteria. Nobody acted like they noticed anything. Everyone was just talking and eating lunch as if Riya chewing on her friend’s hand was normal.

I eventually snapped out of my daze and ran out of the cafeteria, towards the nurse’s office. I didn’t end up there, though. I got as far as the gym, leaving little drops of blood behind me on the tile floor. What would I say to the nurse, I thought, as I dripped my way down the hallway? Would I tell her that Riya bit me because I said seven? Would I tell her that the world was basically going bonkers with everyone saying seven?

On one hand (my bloody one – ha!), telling someone about all the sevens I heard would feel good. Except for you guys, I haven’t talked to anyone about what’s going on. But, on the other hand, what if the nurse is seven-crazy too? Or, and this would be much much worse, what if she tells me what I’ve been afraid of since everyone said seven at the same time in the cafeteria – that I’m losing my mind.

I stopped in the hallway, picturing how that conversation would go down. I imagined the nurse listening to me talk about my sevens. I pictured her expression changing from the normal look of sympathy that nurses give you if you threw up or are afraid of getting a shot, to a super-serious look that means something for-real bad is wrong with you. It’s that moment, the one where you can tell that some awful news is about to hit you in a few seconds and your stomach fills up with fear, that terrified me just as much as the sevens. If I’m developing a serious mental illness, and I really might be, I didn’t want to know just yet. I’ll deal with my malfunctioning brain tomorrow, or in a few days, I thought. I should have one last weekend where it’s still not official that I’m a psychiatric patient. One last weekend where there’s still hope left that everything will eventually be okay.

If I wasn’t going to go to the nurse, though, I still had to go somewhere. Standing in the middle of the hallway bleeding just isn’t a look that I want to be known for. There was no way I was going back to the cafeteria. The library was just around the corner, so I went there.

I wandered into the stacks so I wouldn’t have to talk to any of the kids sitting in the main study area. I pulled a book off the shelf at random and pretended to look at it, just so nobody would try to talk to me while I was in my current state of total freak-out. Of course, when I let it flop open in my hands, it fell open to page seven.

I whisper-shouted “fuck you” at the book and tore out the page. It felt wonderful to rip out and crumple the page – like I was somehow hurting the number seven itself instead of an innocent book. I tossed the book onto the floor next to the blood-dotted ball of its amputated page seven. Then I took another book off the shelf and tore out and crumpled its page seven too. I grabbed a third book and did the same thing.

I felt better. I noticed that my hand had mostly stopped bleeding.  The bell rang and I went to my after-lunch class.

* *

I’m maimed. I’m permanently mutilated and it’s because of that stupid number.

My hand hurt a lot all night after Riya bit it on Friday. It was worse on Saturday, even though I tried to ignore it. It kept me up all night on Saturday and by Sunday it was in constant throbbing agony. I showed it to my mom and something about the way it looked got her worried. “I think it’s infected,” she said. “What happened?”

I told her that Riya bit me. I felt too uncomfortable to tell her about the stuff that’s been happening with everyone saying seven, so I said it was an accident that happened when we were messing around.

“You guys are so weird sometimes,” she said. “I don’t even want to know what you were trying to do. Just get in the car. We’re going to the urgent care clinic.”

The urgent care visit started off normally. My mom filled out a ton of paperwork and we sat around for a while in the waiting room. Then the sevens started happening again. This time they came from just one person: A four-year-old girl who was waiting with her mother. Her mom was reading a magazine and the girl was sliding colored beads around a wire bead maze that was in the kids’ corner.  A few minutes after we sat down, she started counting the beads out loud as she slid them around the wire bends and loops.

“One … two … three … four … five … six … you.”

On one hand, I was grateful she didn’t say you-know-what. But it was creepy the way she looked at me when she said you. She started counting the beads out loud again.

“One … two … three … four … five … six … will.”

She started over again.

“One … two … three … four … five … six … be.”

“What?” I asked her. The girl walked across the room and stood in front of me. Nobody in the waiting room looked up from their phones or magazines. My mom didn’t even pay attention to the weird exchange I was having with this kid.

“I will be what?”

“Seven,” she said. “Seven. Seven. Seven. Seven. Seven….”

The kid kept repeating seven for three or four minutes. Crazily, nobody else in the waiting room payed any attention. I told her to shut up, but she kept saying “Seven. Seven. Seven. Seven…” I was about to get up and carry her back to her mom when she stopped. A second later the door to the main part of the clinic opened. The nurse called us back. The little girl stared at me while I walked away.

The nurse led me and my mom to an examining room. We waited forever for the doctor to show up. Normally, I’d be annoyed to be stuck in solitary confinement with my mom for so long, but today I was relieved that we went to the examining room because it got me away from that creepy little girl.

The examination stayed normal for about a minute after the doctor finally came in to look at my hand

“Hmmm.” The doctor had the same worried look my mom had when she looked at my swollen fingers. “You’ve got a serious infection brewing in three fingers. How did this happen?”

I told him that my friend bit me. “Is that something she normally does?” I didn’t know if he was making small-talk or trying to figure out if I had been assaulted and he needed to fill out additional paperwork. That’s when I made the worst decision of my life. I decided to tell him and my mom what really happened.

“No. Riya is totally normal. I think it was sort-of my fault. I’ve been hearing people say things for a few days. And I think I shouldn’t have said it too.”

My mom and the doctor exchanged a look. My mom asked, “what kind of things?”

“It’s the number seven - ”

My world basically ended the instant I said seven.

“You said seven?” My mom asked the question but the doctor said seven exactly when my mom said it.

“seven? SEVEN?” they were both saying seven at the same time.

“Stop. Shut up!” I screamed. They both stopped talking, but somehow the silence was even worse than their chorus of sevens.

The doctor lifted up my hand again. The way he held it and looked at it reminded me of the way Riya held it before she bit me. But he didn’t bite me. What he did was way worse.

“These fingers.” he stroked my pinky, ring, and middle fingers. “They’re infected. They have to come off.”

“Come off,” my mom said like a robot repeating what the doctor said.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I said it really loud and I started to cry. The nurse who brought me back into the room flung the door open, obviously rushing into the room because of my screaming.

The doctor looked at the nurse. “She said seven,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Now I’ve got to take off three of her fingers.”

The nurse instantly changed from my potential savior into an accomplice. She closed the door, stood behind me and said “I can hold her down while you perform the procedure.”

She wrapped her arms around my body. She was a lot stronger than she looked. Freakishly strong. The doctor opened drawers and cabinets and began pulling out stainless steel medical hardware.

“Mom! Help!” I plead. How could she just let them chop off my fingers? “I want a second opinion! I don’t authorize this procedure!” I just started screaming anything that I thought might help. I struggled to get out of the chair, but the nurse held me down so firmly it felt like being strapped into a roller coaster with shoulder restraints. She didn’t even move when I pushed out of the chair with all of the strength in my legs.

My mom tried to get me to calm down, still talking in a robotic voice. “Seven fingers is better anyway, honey. Just let the doctor do his job. You’ll be seven soon. We all like seven. You will too.”

The doctor jabbed a needle into my shoulder. I struggled and screamed for a few more seconds, but the drug hit me hard and I just kind-of zoned out. I was still awake but in some kind of drugged-out haze when he amputated three fingers on my right hand.

It wasn’t instantaneous, or even very fast. Even though the doctor turned into some kind of finger-hungry, seven-worshipping psycho, he still took his goddamn time taking them off. He narrated my triple finger amputation like he was making an instructional video. “… I haven’t had a chance to do a ray amputation since medical school … going to start by making an incision to create full thickness flaps for later closure … unfortunately I don’t have a saw handy to bevel cut the bone here … use caution to avoid violating the adjacent digital nerve … be sure to incise the extension mechanism …”

Every time he said something, my mom just said “Yes.  Now she’s seven,” in that same trance-like voice.

The shot dulled the pain, but it didn’t dull my understanding that my fucking fingers were getting chopped off! I screamed at my mom through the entire procedure. I tried to yank my hand away, but the nurse changed positions and put her knee on my wrist. Between her strength and the drugs, I couldn’t rip my hand away.

The doctor happily cut, incised, and violated my hand. He amputated my pinky first. He didn’t take off just the finger. He dug out the bone under my knuckle, and the tendons that connected it to my muscles. When he got my pinky off, he held it up in the air and shouted “Nine!”

It took ten more minutes before he held up my ring finger and shouted “Eight!” He sounded like he was counting down until new year’s. Ten more minutes of cutting and slicing. Then he held up my middle finger.

I heard the doctor, the nurse, and my mom chant “SEVEN.” Then I passed out.

* *

I finally understand what’s been happening to me, and I’m pretty sure this will be my last post. This will probably be the last thing I write.

I spent most of the last four days in my room. The doctor who mutilated my hand sent me home with a bunch of gauze and prescription for extra-strength ibuprofen. I didn’t even get a pamphlet about how to care for your amputation.

The pain meds were pretty much useless even though I took twice the amount I was supposed to. My fucking mother spent three days talking to me from the other side of my bedroom door. “Are you okay sweetie. Can I come in and check on you? I’m leaving dinner on a tray out here.” Even though her voice sounded like my mom again, and not the spaced-out seven worshipper she turned into at the urgent care clinic, I didn’t answer her, and I made sure she was in another part of the house when I opened the door to get my food.

I didn’t do much while I self-sequestered except try to get used to the awful new shape of my two-fingered hand. And think. I thought about calling child protective services, since I had basically been tortured and mutilated by my mom and the doctor. I thought about running away. I thought about a lot of things, but mostly I thought about the number seven.

I realized that, even though everyone else – my mom, the doctor, everyone in the cafeteria or the hallway at school, and the guy on the news - said seven a lot, I only said seven twice since this whole mess started happening. I said seven in the cafeteria, right before Riya bit me, and I said it again at the urgent care clinic, right before they cut off my fingers. Whenever I said seven, something happened. Something bad.

I had this realization about what happens when I say seven on the first night after my amputation. I woke up on the second day with a burning urge to say it. It was like when someone says “don’t yawn,” and you immediately need to yawn. But the urge to say seven was even more irresistible than a yawn that you really need to do, or a crazy itch that you need to scratch. It took all my willpower not to open my window and start screaming SEVEN.

On the third day, I stopped taking the painkillers so that, I hoped, the pain of my finger stumps would overwhelm my urge to say seven. My hand still hurt like hell, but, if anything, it made the urge to say seven even stronger.

When I woke up today I knew I was going to have to give in. I had to say seven. I just had to. But, if I was going to say it, this time I’d at least be prepared. I picked up my wooden desk chair and smashed it on the floor. The back broke and one of the legs splintered, but it wasn’t dismantled enough. It took another three or four smashes before I broke off one of the legs. I would use it as a club if anyone attacked me when I said seven.

“Honey! What’s going on?” my mom shouted through the door, obviously summoned by the furniture-smashing sounds. “What are you doing?”

I flung open the door. My mom jumped back, startled. I stared at her for a few seconds as I tightened my grip on the chair leg. Then I said it.

“Seven!”

My mom said “seven” at the same time as me. That’s it. That’s all that happened. After we both said seven at the same time, she just stood there giving me the same blank look that Riya had when she bit me.

“Seven.” I said it again, and she said it at the same time I did. But other than that, she just stood there.

“Seven seven seven seven!” She said it with me each time while staring into my bedroom. I maneuvered around her and walked to the kitchen. A morning news show was on the TV.

“Seven.”

The news host said seven exactly as I did. I ate some Cheerios. The news went to a commercial break.

“Seven.”

The announcer in the car commercial said seven in perfect sync with me. I poured another bowl of Cheerios. Somehow, the normalcy of eating a bowl of Cheerios in my kitchen helped me stay detached and think clearly about what I was experiencing. I could see, I guess, how if I had some kind of mystical power that made everyone say seven at the same time as I did, it that could affect people I was with, like my mom, and even the people on live news. But the commercial was produced and edited long before it aired. I decided to say seven at that instant – it wasn’t planned. How could it just-so-happen to sync perfectly with a prerecorded commercial?

I tried to put my cereal bowl in the sink but accidentally dropped it onto the pile of already-dirty dishes. My mom walked into the kitchen, put my bowl in the dishwasher, and left. She acted like I wasn’t even there.

I went outside and strolled down the sidewalk. Nobody paid any attention to me even though I was wearing my pajamas, holding a broken-off chair leg, and had a hand wrapped in gauze that was almost completely soaked through with dried blood.

The guy who lives three houses down had just pulled into his driveway and was checking his mailbox. I stopped at the foot of his driveway and said “Seven.” He said it when I did, but other than that, he ignored me.

The chair leg slipped out of my good hand and clattered onto the sidewalk. I picked it up and it immediately slid out of my fingers back onto the sidewalk. I picked it up again and again I immediately dropped it. Frustrated, I squatted over the makeshift club and carefully and deliberately grasped it with my good hand. It slipped onto the sidewalk. But this time I was watching. It didn’t slip out of my grip, it slipped through my hand. Through. It literally passed through my palm like I was made out of some kind of fluid.

I thought about the Cheerios. They helped me focus. My situation was getting weirder, and worse by the minute. Apparently, I was not-only invisible, but also permeable. I was unperceivable by other people and matter was able to pass through me. And the only way I had to interact with the rest of the world was to make everyone say seven.

I walked farther down the sidewalk until I came to the bus stop. A half-dozen commuters were waiting for the next bus. I said “Seven.”

All of them said it with me. A woman who was talking on her phone slid the seven into her conversation naturally (“Oh, I’d eat seven of those”). Everyone else just said seven robotically without looking up from their newspapers and phones.

I wandered around town for a few hours. Nobody seemed to see me, and everybody said seven whenever I did. Now and then I experimentally picked up some objects – a coffee cup at Starbucks, a rock from someone’s yard – they all slipped through my hand. I sat on a bench in the park and slipped through it onto the ground. I was becoming more, I don’t know, viscous. Things were slipping through me easier and easier as the day wore on.

I got back home two hours ago. I can still interact with objects in the house, but just barely. I started typing this update as soon as I got home. I was able to turn the computer on by mashing my elbow onto the power button. The small amount of force I exerted on the button as I slid through the computer was just enough to turn it on.

I had to use the same method to type this last post - mashing each key as hard as I can to produce just enough force to type a letter. But I’m not sure I can even do that much longer. I’m getting more and more attenuated.

I don’t feel scared any more, at least. My ability to have emotions is fading, as if fear and joy are pieces of the regular, physical world that pass right through me like everything else. The only thing that feels alive inside of me is the number seven.

I understand what the kid in the waiting room meant. She said I would be seven. And that’s exactly what I became. Soon all I will be in the world is the number seven. I am seven now.